Scuba-2: On-sky calibration using submillimetre standard sources

By J. Dempsey, P. Friberg, T. Jenness, R. Tilanus, H. Thomas, W. Holland, D. Bintley, D. Berry, E. Chapin, A. Chrysostomou and 4 more. 2013

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SCUBA-2 is a 10000-bolometer submillimetre camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). The instrument commissioning was completed in September 2011, and full science operations began in October 2011. To harness the full potential of this powerful new astronomical tool, the instrument calibration must be accurate and well understood. To this end, the algorithms for calculating the line-of-sight opacity have been improved, and the derived atmospheric extinction relationships at both wavebands of the SCUBA-2 instrument are presented. The results from over 500 primary and secondary calibrator observations have allowed accurate determination of the flux conversion factors (FCF) for the 850 and 450 micron arrays. Descriptions of the instrument beam-shape and photometry methods are presented. The calibration factors are well determined, with relative calibration accuracy better than 5 per cent at 850 microns and 10 per cent at 450 microns, reflecting the success of the derived opacity relations as well as the stability of the performance of the instrument over several months. The sample-size of the calibration observations and accurate FCFs have allowed the determination of the 850 and 450 micron fluxes of several well-known submillimetre sources, and these results are compared with previous measurements from SCUBA.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/59a1e06de591832f0153b305e33ab7da7f4e82b3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Scuba-2: Iterative map-making with the sub-millimetre user reduction facility (2013, methodology): “…the 183 GHz (1.6 mm) JCMT Water Vapour Monitor to track line-of-sight opacity variations, see Section 3 in Dempsey et al. 2013), and the application of a flux conversion factor (FCF) which is established from regular measurements of calibrators such as Uranus (Section 5 in Dempsey et al. 2013).”
The NIKA2 large-field-of-view millimetre continuum camera for the 30 m IRAM telescope (2017, result): “Among them, we cite for example Artemis (Reveret et al. 2014) and LABOCA (Siringo et al. 2009) on APEX (Chile), SCUBA2 (Holland et al. 2013) on JCMT (Hawaii), AzTEC (Chavez-Dagostino et al. 2016) on the LMT (Mexico), MUSTANG2 (Dicker et al. 2014) on GBT (USA), HAWC+ (Staguhn et al. 2016) on-board SO”
Characterization of Scuba-2 450 μm and 850 μm selected galaxies in the COSMOS field (2013, result): “These flux conversions factors differ from the current canonical values (Dempsey et al. 2013) because we used an earlier version of Picard.”